The security of information poses challenges for businesses and other organizations that transmit and store information. Data encryption is intended to transform data into a form readable only by authorized users. One encryption method encrypts data represented by a number by multiplying the number by a large prime number to form a product. To decrypt the data, the product must be divided by the original prime number, which is known only to authorized users. Without knowledge of the prime number, the factoring to determine the prime number uses large amounts of processing power and time.
Data encrypted using prime numbers, however, may be readily decrypted by an unintended, unauthorized user, given enough processing power and time. Moreover, encrypting and decrypting data using large prime numbers slows the speed of data transmission such that these methods of encryption may not be feasible for real-time audio and video encryption. In cryptography, there is typically a compromise between processing speed and the degree of information security.
Another encryption method described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,245,658 to Bush et al. encrypts data by first selecting a domain of characters, where each character is associated with a coordinate. Characters are encrypted using the coordinates of the characters. The domain may be switched during encryption of the characters. The teachings of this patent are incorporated herein by reference.
Unauthorized users, however, may eventually decrypt data encrypted using a domain-based encryption method by performing a statistical analysis on the encrypted data. Coordinates that appear frequently in the encrypted data may be associated with characters that appear frequently in the language of the decrypted characters. If a sufficient amount of encrypted data is analyzed, the data may be decrypted. Consequently, encrypting data with a high degree of security and fast processing speed has posed challenges.